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Timeless. Perfect. Enjoy.
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This album was ranked first in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017, and was awarded the Golden Protocol Droid for Best Album I Wrote About in 2017
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Space.
Stars twinkle.
Three horizons hang in the
distance.
A tiny ship darts by, under heavy
fire.
A gigantic grey prow thunders into
frame.
And it keeps coming, and coming,
and coming.
It would be utterly ridiculous,
like Sideshow Bob stepping on far too many rakes, were it not for the
atmosphere of chilling, deadly seriousness that is somehow also extraordinarily
camp.
The underdog and the tyrant are
immediately and unmistakeably established. The Tantive IV is small and white, constructed of pleasantly rounded
shapes, clearly desperately fleeing, while the Devastator is a single majestic triangle, vast and coldly grey, imposing
itself upon our heroes and the screen alike.
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It is timeless, and it is perfect.
In form and function, the music of Star Wars is strikingly operatic. Even
the simplest and most mundane proceedings — an irksome backseat driver or a
simple administrative disagreement — are elevated to high drama by soaring
strings and booming brass. In a stroke of theatrical indulgence, Williams makes
extensive use of leitmotifs: short, symbolic musical segments that shift and
change with their subject. Luke’s theme swells contemplatively as he gazes past
the binary sunset, but returns frenzied and panicked during several of his
action sequences. The Rebellion fanfare plays softly on subdued woodwinds when
the Tantive is captured, shivering
with dread, but is reprised boldly on trumpets when the space shoe is on the
other space foot during the Battle of Yavin. Mozart would be proud.
Some may criticise this approach as
overly didactic, using music to dictate rather than suggest appropriate
emotional reactions to the audience, but I would argue that this is the whole
point. Everything becomes important. (Additionally, following the mood instead
of leading it can backfire spectacularly. In Attack of the Clones, straight after the infamously blunt and enduringly
unsexy sand monologue, Anakin and Padmé share their first kiss. The string
section swells, dewy-eyed and romantic, but immediately backs off as Padmé
changes her mind. It is as if even the orchestra is embarrassed to witness such
an awkward moment, and it never fails to draw a laugh out of me. The passive,
burnished sheen of newer Star Wars recordings
does not help its case. The music of the originals is present and active and
ineffably immediate in a way that latter-day Star Wars has not yet rediscovered.) A New Hope is an extravagant melodrama of jolly good and cartoonish
evil, like the silent films of early cinema. The music must be comically inflated
to offset the alienating unrealism of the silver screen.
Luke is fairly untraumatised by the
violent murder of his surrogate parents, leaving their corpses to smoulder as
he skips off to join the Rebellion. Almost no ado is made about the three
million aboard the Death Star when it is unexpectedly redistributed. And most
egregiously, Leia is briefly horrified at the destruction of her homeworld —
two billion innocent souls up in less than smoke — but in her very next scene is making
quips about the diminutive stature of her guard.
Perhaps our beloved characters
throw themselves into the Rebel cause so enthusiastically to hide the deep
psychological scarring, constantly bickering and bantering to distract
themselves from the ache inside. But this interpretation is not supported by
the music. John Williams suggests that these characters are not people, but
puppets, empty vessels to be filled with plot and drama, and George Lucas
himself concurs. His utilitarian dialogue is reminiscent of children’s
television, where all characters are perfectly aware of their emotions and intentions,
and constantly exposit them at those around them.
But it is also reminiscent of
another genre of heightened reality: theatre. A New Hope is a show. It is a performance, right from the very
beginning where a minstrel unfurls a scroll and narrates the introduction, as
if Star Wars were a fairy-tale.
Everyone is deceptive. Everyone is pretending. Han is pretending that he
doesn’t care for the cause. Our initial point-of-view characters, R2-D2 and
C-3PO, are pretending that they are not clinging to one another out of sheer
terror. They squabble like the old married couple they may as well be because
that is the only way they know how to display affection. Darth Vader is
pretending that he deserves his wretched existence of loveless servitude after tearing
down his old life out of pure paranoia, fanned by the flames of the Emperor’s
gaslight. And Leia is pretending she isn’t catastrophically out of her depth, seizing
control of her own rescue mission, and insisting to Vader’s face that her
suspiciously zippy little corvette is in fact a consular ship on a diplomatic
mission. This is, at most, hours after Vader personally witnessed its escape
from the orbit of Scarif. He was a heartbeat away from throwing an impromptu
boarding party himself. Only she could be so bold.
This is not to imply that A New Hope is shallow. It is certainly simple — an unambiguous clash between good and evil — but its thematic content is
universal. Never attempt to negotiate in good faith with someone who holds all
the cards, or you may doom your entire planet. Your instincts may or may not be
trustworthy, but recognise when things designed to help you are instead
hindering you. And above all, in the face of unimaginable adversity, when all
other avenues of approach have been blocked, it does not do to give up hope.
I do prefer the new title, after
forty years of shifts in popular culture, and especially after seeing Rogue One. Everyone knows about science
fiction; setting a war among the stars is par for the course nowadays. That particular
epithet functions more effectively as the overarching series title. After
seeing first-hand the cost of victory, we know that hope is the only thing that
keeps the Rebellion going. The Empire outclasses them in every conceivable
measurement: unparalleled firepower, an entire navy at their disposal, literally
astronomical financial resources.
And yet, as Emily Dickinson writes,
hope is the thing with feathers.
On the topic of things with
feathers, that flourishing woodwind section can outsing even the most virtuosic
of birds. Damn, folks, the London Symphony can really play. Williams’
compositions are notoriously difficult, even for veteran musicians, often compiling
tight clusters of note and obtuse tonal shifts in close succession. His signature fascination with the interplay between triplets and duplets means those who play his music must actively work against muscle memory. But the
orchestra navigates even the knottiest sections nimbly and with considerable
grace, a compliment that applies doubly to the brass and woodwind sections. The
diaphragm is a muscle, and like any other it takes a great deal of strength and
skill to push it to the extraordinary heights Williams demands. The London
Symphony Orchestra is a prodigiously skilled group of musicians, and they
should be proud of their achievement.
When I listen to old, vinyl-crackly
jazz music, I feel a strange sense of nostalgia by proxy. All the synchronised
brass and jaunty polyrhythms evoke a very particular atmosphere — pinstriped
suits and A-line skirts, whiskey fumes and cigarette smoke — that I have never
actually experienced myself. There is a timelessness to it. We may have moved
on to pastures new, perhaps greener, but this fedorish world still exists as
long as there are people to remember it.
I get a similar feeling listening
to this soundtrack. It is a portal to a smiling, sharply drawn world that
exists only in my imagination, bearing at most a casual resemblance to the real
world, but is no less realistic for it. Star
Wars makes me think of rosy-cheeked space-age optimism, of Tomorrowland, of
David Bowie and Michael Jackson, of when the future was bright and shiny and
exciting. And nowhere is this clearer than in a single brief moment of
exception. As Luke enters Jabba’s palace in Return
of the Jedi, a low synthesiser hums portentously, and every time I watch
the film it completely takes me out of it. That synthesiser reminds me of contemporary
soundtracks: cheesy, two-dimensional and tragically dated. It is a lone lapse
of judgement in a trilogy of thrillingly original music, but despite its
clumsiness, it encourages me to appreciate the rest of the soundtrack all the
more.
Each of these worlds of nostalgia
has a distinctly different flavour. It is only a single variety of jazz that
conjures up the feeling, whereas John Williams’ soundtrack is a confluence of
influences. The music of Star Wars takes
the rigid regulation of Bach, tempers it with the spiky asymmetry of
Stravinsky, and for good measure, tips on a heap of Wagnerian, Mahleresque,
Holstish bombast. The result: a sweeping masterpiece of neoclassicism. I adore
that poignant violin solo in Leia’s theme that rises higher and higher,
modestly drawing to a close on a cloudburst of a note I didn’t even know
existed. The Empire clearly takes itself deadly seriously, with all the grim
pompous pomp, but the audience is under no such obligation. The dime-shifting
colours and moods of the space dogfighting are a master class in incidental
music. And that iconic main theme never fails to put a smile on my face, a bold
brassy march that takes itself just seriously enough to be inexhaustibly
charming. Even when listening to only the soundtrack, an eagle-eared fan can
still trace exactly what is happening. This is a triumph of musical
storytelling.
At the risk of sounding like an
unbearable hipster, you just don’t see genuine composition in modern
blockbuster films. Their soundtracks have all the subtlety of a frying pan to
the head — jagged, sawing string sections and pounding percussion — because that’s
all they need to meet the unbelievably low standards set for them. Williams’ music is elegantly fluid, ebbing and flowing with the
onscreen action, whereas a great deal of newer soundtracks find little of
interest on the dial between zero and eleven. This is not to say that it is a
lost art. Hans Zimmer’s scores, especially those for Inception and Pirates of the
Caribbean occupy a fertile middle ground. But none of them hold a candle to
Star Wars: beneath the layers of
vibrancy and exaggeration, there lies a deep and abiding love for classical
music — and let us not conflate that with music merely scored for orchestra.
Forty years later, this soundtrack is as fresh and exciting as the day it was
recorded.
A general rule of thumb: the better
something is, the more flaws can be excused or justified or even outright ignored.
And A New Hope, for all its flaws, is an instant classic. I don’t care
that the characters deliver their lines as if they are reading from off-screen
cue cards. I don’t care about the oblique dimension the squadrons of ships seem
to occupy during the assault on the Death Star. I don’t care about Obi-Wan and
Vader’s dumb lightsaber poking contest. (I especially don’t care about this one
in light of that one scene from Rogue One
wherein, not to put too fine a point on it, Vader fucks shit up.)
I can think of no other film that
has contributed as much to our cultural lexicon; every other minute, A New Hope originates one of dozens of
famous quotes, or displays one of its myriad iconic designs. It is brimming
with brilliant, gleaming, new, extraordinary ideas. It gives so much, freely
and willingly. It reminds us that even in the darkest night, even now —
especially now — that hope is the linchpin, the cornerstone, the beating heart
and the first step. And at the end of the day, after all the vaudevillian drama
has bowed out, after all the kickass space dogfights have been won, after the
greatest film soundtrack ever composed has played its final chords and relaxed
into static, that is all we need.
I leave you with the words of
someone else.
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”